Quality Assurance In Secondary Education - "A Bridge Too Far"?

Terms, concepts, definitions

Although we currently have access to a vast literature on Quality Management, however, we can see that literature dedicated to quality management in education is relatively poor. There is still a quote of Sallis (1992), although at that time it was written with considerable reservations and reticence about a fundamental "dilemma": "What is education? Product or service? Or pupils/ students are the "product of education"! According to the definitions in the literature, Quality Management has four essential components (in the following sequence):

a) Quality planning - involving the setting of quality objectives and policies. This part reflects the ability of an organization to establish / plan its quality objectives and policies. By default, the resources and processes that will be involved in achieving these goals must be established. Quality planning is in correlation with three fundamental factors: what customers want; requirements / specifications of products / services (standards); the ability of the organization to achieve the first two factors;

b) Quality control - involving the satisfaction of quality requirements. Quality Control represents all the organization's actions in the management of in-house processes in order to achieve the three factors mentioned above;

c) Quality assurance - involving confidence in meeting the quality requirements. In reality, Quality Assurance is the organization's ability to provide stakeholders with confidence that the three factors mentioned above can be achieved ;

d) Improving quality - Improving the capacity to meet the quality requirements. Quality Improvement represents all the actions undertaken by the organization in order to improve the organization's ability to meet the quality requirements;

Of course, these components cannot be separated because an essential aspect of quality management is that of a systemic approach that is valid for all four components, in the form of an integrated approach.

An "aspect" of the separation of the four sides is seen in the case of the implementation of quality management in educational processes. As a rule, "Quality Management in Education" (and "Quality of Education Management") is associated in the current expression only with "quality assurance in education" (and, respectively, the concept of "quality assurance of education"). This approach is especially found in European education systems and, most importantly, in community documents that regulate this issue. It is interesting and almost inexplicable why the "initiators" of the approach preferred the "extraction" of the quality assurance (for the education segment) from the established concept, the quality management!

It would be useful, in our view, to investigate the causes for which the Community Courts (the periodic conferences of the Ministers of Education in the Member States) accepted the ENQA (2018) proposal for exclusive use of the concept of "quality assurance", although the quality management specialists know too well that this can’t exist without the other three components mentioned above.

In Romania, the action was "institutionalized" by a normative act that led to the establishment of almost unique regulation in the Romanian society. Thus, besides the construction sector, the education sector became, after 2005, the second sector with a regulated approach from the perspective of quality.

For obvious reasons arising from the need to use these terms correctly, we will continue to outline some of the concepts that we find in the glossary of terms of the most „shaky” quality management agency: the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and the Standard ISO 9000: 2015, dedicated to the concepts and terms used in this important field (ASQ - American Society for Quality, 2018).

A simple analysis of the definitions presented leads us to the conclusions of at least "interesting".

• Quality assurance . While the ISO 9000 terminology standard "focuses" on the definition of this concept on the organization's ability to provide confidence (to customers) that "quality requirements are accomplish, the Romanian normative act translates this definition into "quality standards” - thus, an external reference organization! (AN: The standard quality concept is inappropriate / redundant and does not express what the designer has intended - it is actually a minimal standard that should be accomplished for the approval / accreditation of a school / university!) Which leads to the conclusion that the school organization should establish its quality policies / requirements only on the basis of the standard requirements and less / at all than the expectations of the customers!

Let’s suppose that a school is accredited. It results that it will give confidence to stakeholders that the school meets the quality requirements formulated / established by that standard, that is, to say the minimum quality level! Accreditation of all schools in the system will give confidence to society in the fact that the system works to the quality requirements formulated by the accreditation standard, achieving what we call quality assurance in education but at the minimum level of quality! The quality assurance process in education , in the current, specifically Romanian approach, obliges schools to maintain their quality requirements at the level of the accreditation standard without encouraging them in any way to orient these requirements primarily towards client or / and at the level of the optimal level standard , for example, or to a recognized performance standard (ISO 9001) or a model of excellence (EFQM model) EFQM, 2018). The normative act specifies what is meant by "internal assurance of the quality of education": establishment of a quality assessment and quality commission in each educational entity. The key role of this committee is to monitor (in compliance with the normative act) the application of quality assessment and quality assurance procedures and activities in the organization, reporting on their achievement and formulating improvements to the quality of education. In fact, the activities of this commission are very different from what the normative act has set out. The normative act does not explicitly mention what means the external assurance of the quality of education.

B. Q uality control . The ISO 9000 standard tells us that this process is "part of quality management focused on meeting quality requirements". Quality control can be defined as the set of corrective actions aimed at eliminating the causes of nonconformities.

Therefore, quality assurance will include customer-oriented (external) actions, trusting that what the organization has said about quality has achieved, while quality control will include actions (internal) centered on meeting quality requirements. From this perspective, quality assurance can be defined as the set of preventive actions (in the new version of the standard (ISO 9001: 2015) this process is in the form of risk management. Consequently, quality assurance should be: generating the confidence that what has been said is done plus a high-risk management!

It is noted that in the definitions formulated by the normative act, the client's requirements are missing from the "equation".

The problem of this concept in the education system is a major one because it is very difficult for the teaching staff to be convinced or understand that in reality pupils and students are not their products and that they are their clients. It was very difficult to accept the concept of the beneficiary, however, the advance is still insufficient, in our opinion, because a correct approach is the client approach!

4.1. Quality assurance in education - realities, perspectives

The positive effects of this approach would have to be found, first of all, in an effective improvement in quality in education - improving the quality at the educational system level by:

- Effective and effective functioning of the schools in the system or, at least, most of them, respectively, of a crucial critical mass for the educational system;

- Improving the educational services offered by schools in the system, with straight effects in improving the results obtained by students at the completion of the study cycles;

- Effective improvement of results obtained at system level, internationally established testing in the field (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, 2018) between two successive editions.

The results obtained in the last three PISA editions confirm the conclusion of mediocre results, although a significant percentage of the evaluated schools obtained the "ARACIP - RAQAPE quality certificate. The functioning of schools in the system has not improved since the introduction of quality assurance in education / education. Differences between urban and rural schools (on operation, endowment, staffing and results) have increased considerably. Bureaucracy of redundant papers and reports - a straight effect of the quality assurance approach in education, in the current approach - has increased exponentially, overlapping with other effects generated by an excessive culture of inspection. We refer to the existence of at least 4 control-inspection factors exerted on today's school: general school inspection, CNDIPT (2018) inspection for vocational schools and technological high schools, evaluation / monitoring by ARACIP -RAQAPE, evaluation / control / inspection carried out by other institutions in the higher schools (county council, prefecture, ministry etc. Have elapsed 12 years since the approval of the basic normative act for this approach and 11 years since the effective implementation of the approach to the functioning of the education system. A brief conclusion shows that the quality assurance of education in the pre-university education system did not succeed! After more than 11 years of implementation, the quality in education / of education quality assurance process should have achieved its essential purpose of generating confidence amongst all stakeholders that most schools in the system are operating at pre-established standards for their institutional assessment (ARACIP – RAQAPE, n.d.).

This desideratum has not been achieved and the key objective of quality assurance is becoming more and more difficult to achieve, becoming a "far removed bridge"! It is a reality that, if it wasn’t accepted, the negative effects would probably exponentially multiply! What are the causes of this failure?

Results of comparative analyzes, and qualitative research applied to the quality assurance of education in Romania (secondary education)

The qualitative research elements and comparative analyzes have led us to identify the causes of the failure to achieve the main objective of the quality assurance in education / of education approach in the Romanian educational system:

- The definitions formulated by the basic legislation in the field were, in our view, the main cause of the failure, because, as we have seen from a "mirror" comparison of these definitions, the definitions formulated in normative acts are different and / or defective;

- Institutional Evaluation Standards are constructed in terms of "at least" - becoming, in reality, mandatory rules for schools. "At least" is a minimum level, which will force schools in the system to formulate their development goals, correlated with the requirements of the mandatory standard - a minimum level of quality!

- Specific legislation in this field speaks of quality assurance in education / of education without making a distinction between the two syntagma (generating obvious confusion)! For example, in the official "statements" of the agency responsible for quality assurance, it is clear: "... we cannot talk about quality assurance only at school level, because only there can be the confidence of the participants in the educational process that the results obtained will have value for them." (ARACIP - Conceptual and Methodological Milestones on the National Management and Quality Assurance System, page 3). Therefore, according to these official statements, we cannot talk about quality assurance at the educational system level! (ARACIP – RAQAPE, n.d.).

- The center of gravity of these "standards" is significantly shifted to the organization and functioning of the school (infrastructure, spaces, procedures, etc.), with a disproportionate burden on the organization and functioning of the school, to the detriment of educational effectiveness and school management;

- Institutional assessment standards in the current form are genuinely bureaucratic by: the very large number of redundant and irrelevant requirements for the educational process, its superposition with other school referential, the faulty external evaluation as it does not respect any of the generally applicable principles of the external evaluation (second part - assessment by the clients of the organization or third part- evaluation carried out by an independent organization), given that the agency is subordinated to the Ministry of Education and the evaluators are persons active in the system. We mean that valuers are, for the most part, active in the system. During the evaluation process, these experts interrupt their activity at the school where they work and go to the schools they evaluate. In quality management, the general principle in the external audit activity is that of "third part" assessment, to carry out a relevant and objective audit.

Quality assurance in the educational system - proposals to improve the approach

A first improvement could be achieved by eliminating confusion about the "quality assurance" process introduced by the normative act (GEO nr. 75/2005), because in many situations it is being discussed about "quality assurance in education" and „quality assurance of education" (Dragulănescu, China, Militaru, & Colceag, 2014) as if the two syntagma had the same meaning. We believe this is a major confusion with multiple negative effects (China, 2015). From our point of view, " quality assurance in education " encompasses interrelated processes relating to "providing confidence that most / at least a critical mass of educational entities in the system will meet quality requirements."

"Quality assurance of education" is a process (described above) triggered by the school organization by which it provides confidence that the quality requirements (as declared by it) will accomplish! A major difference between the two concepts, because in the first case the responsibility for quality assurance lies with the management of the system , while in the second case the responsibility lies with the management of the school organization .

A second improvement should be at the level of the concepts used in the basic regulatory act [18], since the biggest confusion is generated by the misuse of these concepts.

A third improvement , we believe, can be achieved by rethinking some benchmarks (standards) so as to highlight three essential pillars:

- Management of school organizations;

- Quality of teachers;

- Outputs from educational processes (educational cycles) reflected in terms of results and, in particular, pupils' skills.

Horizontally , the standards should be compatible with other school referential so that the reconciliation process leads to a single referential - drastically reducing the existing bureaucratic pressure on the school organization. For example, through a flexible and efficient construction, three standards existing at this time in the educational system can be merged into the same reference: The specific standards of the internal management control system, the General School Inspection Regulation and the quality management standards used by CNDIPT in the evaluation of schools in the vocational and technical education system. The resulting reference could be used differentially for each level of education and type of activity carried out by an educational entity: external evaluation, internal evaluation, control, monitoring, etc (CNDIPT. 2018).

The fourth improvement could be achieved through the use of third-part external evaluation which requires external evaluations by an independent and objective agency in order to eliminate the risk of subjectivism existing in the current approach.

The fifth improvement may be in the "area" of using experts (really prepared) in the evaluation process, without confusion with what we usually call inspectors .

Clearly, there are many more improvements that can be formulated. We've succeeded in penciling a few, which means the problem remains open. Any of the five improvements mentioned above can consistently reconfigure the quality of education approach and can greatly contribute to reducing bureaucracy in the system.